


Overcoming Tropes and Culling Sacred Cows: How The Wire Succeeded

by yourlibrarian



Series: Reviews [14]
Category: The Wire
Genre: Gen, Meta, Reviews
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 08:16:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6697003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourlibrarian/pseuds/yourlibrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look back at the series and what made it special, as well as discussion of its few blind spots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Overcoming Tropes and Culling Sacred Cows: How The Wire Succeeded

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on October 13, 2011

I really enjoyed this post on [on U.S. tropes in storytelling](http://aliettedebodard.com/2011/08/31/on-the-prevalence-of-us-tropes-in-storytelling/). Regardless of whether you agree with all her points, it does something I wish I'd see more often, which is to examine what kind of messages get reinforced repeatedly across media texts. Not surprisingly, this is easier to spot when the texts are not from your culture. One thing I've always liked about fanworks is that they can (often, but not always) make the invisible, visible. Sometimes this is done with gap fic, or by foregrounding a previously overlooked character, or by speculation on all the possible branches of a plot point -- things unexplored by the passive viewer (which we all are at different times). 

However, fanworks don't tend to be as good at doing this when it comes to multiple bodies of work (multifandom vids are a bright exception) or when it comes to fanworks themselves. When one sees observations on fanworks as a genre, it's often in crack fic. Some of the problems the blogger mentions are things that are often recreated in fanworks, as opposed to being changed (sometimes with only a recasting to alter them). 

Interestingly, I find that a great many of the tropes she complains about seem to exist largely because white male leads are so ubiquitous, and thus drive particular storylines. For example:

1) "plots that value individualism and egotism above all else; of heroes that always have to be the masters of their own fates, to be active and not take anything that life deals at them lying down (whereas most of the time, we lie down, we accept, we deal with what we have been given)"

2) "how teams exist only either as a background and foil for a single hero, or as a compendium of individuals, each fighting to be outdo each other in stupid displays of heroism"

3) " the redefinition of narrative as violence, of how everything has to be a conflict in order to be valid–even to the point of defining conflict “against yourself”"

4) Also, from the comments: "Can they also stop having EVERY male protagonist have issues with his father?"

On the other hand, some of these writing problems spring from marketing efforts. When products are being marketed on a worldwide scale, the job is simpler when they can employ cliches and common tropes. So that this:

"I want novels which can be complex and organic like life itself, and which don’t have to be neatly pigeon-holed in order to be read and enjoyed."

gets seen a lot less than yet another remake of something we've all seen already in twelve different iterations starring someone who has name recognition in the Himalayas. On the other hand, if you're going to market stuff around the world, the following is not likely to go over well (and it's also completely unrealistic):

"Plots featuring America as the centre of the world, where aliens land near LA–and decisions are made in NYC for the entire world."

And all of this made me think of The Wire, which I've just finished watching. What a spectacular series. I've read that people were disappointed with S5, particularly since it was two episodes shorter than usual. But I'm going to miss the vast tapestry of tragedy, though not because I find tragedy appealing -- because it's actually tough to experience at times. But it's more that so much of The Wire rings so true that one can't turn away from it -- kind of the inverse of discovering that magic actually exists.

#### Changing the Narrative

I'm also going to miss the fact that there are so many industries left unexplored by the show (Wendell Pierce mentioned in a commentary that people often ask about the health care industry). One of many things I loved about the series was the way this Baltimore seemed like a real place, with people passing one another who never "meet" and people coming and going in the main threads of the story. I found it unsurprising that while the media generally loved The Wire, and attested to the truth of its look at policing and politics, that they didn't embrace the season on journalism. If anything, I thought the show went too easy on some of the intrinsic problems with the profession and industry.

But I wanted to focus this post on the positives of the series. And probably the top thing, from a writing perspective, was the way it developed characters by giving them all agendas (or a negative space of one). The problem with so many shows is that minor characters, sometimes even secondary characters, don't seem to have agendas of their own. But every human being does, and when they are gathered in groups, these agendas conflict. Someone's agenda may predominate, but often times those other agendas find expression in small and often subversive ways. If this is seen at all, most often a show will treat such an expression as a "betrayal" which means two things. First, it puts forward the idea that there can only ever be one agenda as the natural order. And second, it puts forward the idea that identity should be erased in favor of following the dictates of the most powerful, because (in the current parlance of the Wall Street protests) "the 99% are there to serve the 1%."

This is not true in The Wire. The reason there are so many believable characters and people you can identify with (and against) is exactly because they all have their own perspectives, ambitions, and values. And if that isn't apparent at first, it may become so over the seasons in repeated appearances, or as they get a larger part in the story. In fact, the whole story of The Wire is about how people's differing agendas are what makes up life; what causes tragedy, and what undermines institutions. And sometimes, it's what causes successes, because the bases get covered when one individual's blind spot does not prevail. 

The Wire gives favor to the individual over the institution -- to a point. I found it interesting how, in the final episode commentary, David Simon says that he never believed in the journalism rule about not showing a story to one's source prior to publication (in this case "source" meaning "feature," as in the piece on Bubs), and that he broke it himself while in the profession. That perspective is reflected in efforts to change academia by creating more honesty in sociology and anthropology studies, where people are not "subjects" for study but people who have a stake in what is written about them. Of course, it goes hand in hand with a greater acknowledgment of the researcher's role in the study, and how their own perspectives are just as much a part of the study as the "data" they are collecting. However, the resistance to this honesty in research is remarkably strong, even when research methods are taught with acknowledgments that "objectivity" is a fiction. In journalism it's even worse, because the idea that the reporter is not part of the story is a mantra, even though all stories start with the reporter (or the assigning editor), simply due to what was chosen for coverage. The very process of selection for inclusion, for exclusion, for depth or for passing mention, for labeling, for tone, etc. are all choices that display the POV of the individual, or of an individual bowing to the biases of their institution.

So while The Wire does explore the humanity within institutions, it also finds justice only in collective action. The collective action is generally organized by institutions, whether they are unions or political structures or bureaucratic ones, and the perspective expressed in the show is that the strong skew of particular actors within institutions (or attempting to operate too far outside them) is what causes institutions to become dysfunctional. Thus we have Frank Slobotka trying to BE the union, ultimately destroying it; or criminal institutions functioning on the kingpin model inevitably being overturned by a new contender. It's suggested in the final episode that Stringer's consensus model of criminal governance has a continuing legacy, not just because the players gather to jointly negotiate with the connection, but because of Cheese's death. It comes as a direct result of his stated allegiance to that model, and his complicity in taking down Prop Joe, Stringer's partner in change.

There was a lot of interesting discussion in the commentaries, mostly because the majority were done between writer and producer, or a director and writer. One quote from the final two episodes of S3 was "I've seen every car chase scene and gun fight scene I ever need to see." That, to me, summed up a lot of their philosophy. It's not that there weren't shootouts and fights, but the punch to the gut of the show never came from the action scenes. Some of them were so subtle they could almost pass by before you realized the spiral of events that were about to follow. The resulting destruction was often far more heartbreaking than guys firing away at one another.

#### Taking its Time

Which leads to another strength -- patience. Patience was exerted in storytelling, in the timing of shots, in creating depth to what was being written, and believing the audience would catch on. Another quote from those episode commentaries: "Most TV is 'insert cop crap here' or 'insert medical crap here' and then let's move on to the love story. But the stuff the cops are doing is what's interesting if you pay attention...The stuff the doctors are doing is what you could learn about." That's also what set the show apart -- not a love of technobabble, but of how action or inaction on the job leads to success or tragedy, and how the motivations of the people involved are sometimes completely disconnected to what we might consider favorable or unfavorable outcomes. So the details of the work become important (and also, at least to me, really interesting to learn about). They also know that pleasing everyone pleases no one: "You can't write for the average viewer. You write for the person who has lived the experience. If you can't fool them with our artifice then what are you doing?"

What's more, writing for a smart audience means they actually expect that audience to step up. When speaking about the symbolism of the train and the tracks in McNulty and Bunk's scene in 3.12, the writers were annoyed that no one had caught on to the symbolism. "In literature they know to look for it. People just don't respect TV, that's part of the problem." The other producer pointed out that The Wire is a dense text, and though the tracks are obvious, there is subtler stuff going on in episodes that people would have to watch more than once to pick up. But the comment amused me, in that the writers felt TV had trained the audience poorly to watch critically. That's not just the fault of the television industry, it's also the fault of the media and the education system in not training people to think critically of _everything_ in their lives. It doesn't have to be a constant thing, but it should be something that is always done at least once in every area.

Which takes us back to the failure of the institutions The Wire talks about. In the "Last Word" featurette, they talk a lot about the journalism angle of the final season, and about how news and politics are run the same way, trying to find out what will play rather than trying to accomplish something. However, what I think The Wire itself did was along the lines of what was done in S4 with the special class for the problem kids. The message of that season was pretty clear -- stratification works better for everyone. It works better for the teachers, who get to actually do their jobs. It works better for the kids who want to, or are at least, willing to learn. They get to not only focus on tasks but are probably also freer of the negative peer pressure to stay unfocused. And it works better for the problem kids who get special attention geared toward their own issues. 

I think The Wire took that same angle with the audience. In many ways their experiment "failed" if the point was to become a massive hit (for either HBO or a broadcast network). A fair number of people have watched it, sure, but not percentage wise. It remains a highly under-watched and, outside of some critics, un-discussed series even for its own network. These days HBO is pulling decent rating numbers for many of its shows, given that TV ratings have fallen overall. 

However The Wire succeeded through stratification. People who were willing, even eager, to see a message with some ambition, found it extremely rewarding. I think that many people felt the themes of the show, and the incidents in it, were universal, even if they were drawn quite specifically from a troubled city in the U.S. People are people everywhere; corruption, greed, ambition, crime, despair, incompetence, and good intentions are found everywhere. I don't know how well The Wire maps onto the experiences of people in other countries, but I think it maps pretty well throughout the U.S.

#### The Problematic Hero

Returning to the issue of problematic tropes that occur over and over in U.S. entertainment, I mentioned how The Wire largely avoided this by presenting a strangely universal story springing from actual events in a specific U.S. city. It also avoided having a central hero (or in making most of its characters particularly heroic), and its central theme was equally diffuse, that of random people within institutions wishing to be able to do their intended job properly. 

It also defied the idea that all narrative had to be violence or intentional conflict. Simply by having different venues of success and advancement, people were, just by being themselves, inevitably going to be in conflict with one another due to either scarcity of resources or differing ambitions. Even the dreaded "Daddy issues" at the root of numerous male protagonists were largely unexplored in The Wire, even though they could have been rampant in its storylines. In fact, for every character who did have such a problem (Michael, for example) you had another character who _was_ that bad dad (McNulty), or who showed themselves to be a good father (the selflessness of WeeBey and Colvin). 

However, there is one glaring exception to several of these tropes: I have issues with Omar. He seems to me to be the Spike of The Wire. This may sound like an odd thing to say given that Spike was my favorite character on Buffy and I've always enjoyed Omar enormously, as I was intended to. And to me that was the first problem. I think that the humanity that emerges from all the characters makes most of them sympathetic (Bubs in particular, who is the Tin Man of the show). Yet they all have weaknesses which range from understandable to deeply unsympathetic. Omar is the only character who comes off as unproblematically heroic. 

In the beginning, one can't help but admire Omar and his way of making a living. He'll kill but it's not his usual choice, and the targets are people who are at risk of being taken out at any time. When he decides to turn informant the audience is on his side, not just because he's making the case for Team Daniels, but because he has every justification for wanting the killers nailed. His response to Levy's cross-examination also sums up a great deal about that largely unexamined character and his role in the system.

Omar's apogee is the Brother Mouzone storyline, both in how Omar lets him live, and then in how they join forces to kill Stringer Bell for his betrayal of them both. There's tragedy and triumph in that moment, but the triumph is mostly Omar's. After all Bell reaped what he'd sown over many years, however much many in the audience might identify with his dual desires for personal escape and reforming a violent system. And Mouzone is a largely unexamined killer who will go on to ply his trade after wrapping up loose ends in Baltimore.

The S3 scene between Omar and Bunk is a very clear effort by the writers to correct the cult of Omar, by pointing out how his status as a cultish hero (both within and outside the series) was problematic. However, I think it's interesting that it should be Bunk who has that talk with him -- not only because he can relate to Omar in a way that, say, McNulty can't (even though McNulty also recognizes Omar's code) -- but also because Bunk clearly has his own code as well. This is shown when he really goes to bat for Omar in S4 and in the way he completely opposes McNulty's actions in S5. But I think Bunk's speech is undermined by the fact that he and Omar do both understand and respect codes, and that Omar is, in a way, a mirror of Bunk.

A preseries vignette of Omar as a, probably, 13 year old is particularly revealing. He's with two other kids who insist on robbing a man waiting for a bus. Omar criticizes the choice of target (unlikely to have much money), and lets the man keep his wallet and just hand over the cash. After the man turns over $15, Omar feels it isn't even worth depriving the man of his cash and gives it back to him.

I saw that as a perfect example of everything that was wrong with Omar's existence in the series. Even Bubs didn't seem to have any pangs of conscience about robbing people. I suspect the purpose of the vignette was to show why Omar decided to target drug dealers exclusively. But Omar was plenty smart and patient enough to have chosen another path for himself (which, I suspect, is what Bunk's speech to him was intended to point out). But the idea that he could have been something better than a really capable thief seems to take a back seat in the series to things like throwing him out of a three story building, yet he's still able to get away. If they really wanted to take Omar down a peg they should have done what Joss Whedon did with Spike, and undermine his "cool." But Omar never really loses it, he just has obstacles to overcome. He's too classic a hero. 

Omar always comes out on top, right until his final moment. He's smarter than most of the other characters, he's certainly cooler, and he's very skilled at what he does. Out of all the characters, Omar never makes a mistake of incompetence, which is only true of a few of the characters. Plus, he never makes a mistake due to excessive belief in his own skill or righteousness, which is unique among all the other characters, who fail at least once on one of those two axis. Omar suffers setbacks, sure, but he never loses the war, and never due to his own failures. One might argue that he does so when he loses Tosha due to his obsession with the Barksdales. But first, Omar won that war (his very boredom in the following season makes that clear), and second, he might have lost people but it was through no fault of his own. Omar's reasons for robbing weren't just financial, they were always personal: it was his own version of The Game.

I thought it was telling that in the featurette on the series, it's revealed that, like Spike, Omar was intended to be a 7 episode character. And since this was not a show afraid of killing characters in service of the story, there was no reason Omar couldn't have been killed off a long time ago. In reality, his storyline doesn't service the stories past early S2 when he finally testifies. Even the death of Stringer Bell would have played out exactly the same had Mouzone acted alone, since it was he who forced Avon's hand into giving Bell up. In fact, I think Omar's greatest contribution was in robbing Prop Joe's supply, his final score, because it was that incident which allowed Marlo to force Joe's hand in introducing him to his connection. 

So Omar was kept around largely because he pleased both the audience and the writers, and in a complex show like The Wire, he really did take away screen time and storyline time from other characters that might have been better developed. For example, I thought the one area of The Game that was barely explored was the legal profession. How did Levy make all his connections? What brought him into that area of the profession? How did all of that work? The only insight we get into that is in S5, which is the most rushed season, and it doesn't do anything to further explore the character.

Buffy and The Wire are very different shows with very different purposes. Their one commonality is that both are shows that do an excellent job with characters, so while I have always found the complaints that Spike "took over" Buffy absurd, there is no question that the character broke the mold in many ways of what the show did, something the actor and writers acknowledge, nearly all of whom loved writing for him. Spike and Omar are both fringe figures in their universe, for one or more reasons, so they get to do commentary and they get to mess with the "natural order" of their worlds, which makes them interesting to watch and enticing to write. But Omar, much more than Spike, is an indulgence. Spike was dangerous in that, through his character, one could really question the underpinnings of the Buffyverse, especially as seen on Buffy rather than Angel. But the show, as the title reflected, was always about her. The Wire was an ensemble show where even the one character that might be seen as the lead was sidelined through an entire season of the show (something that may have been a behind-the-scenes necessity but which I thought only improved the series). So having one character who was an indulgence mattered a lot more.

While in some ways I would have loved the idea of Omar and Renaldo spending their years in the sunshine, it couldn't have ended that way. But the impression that is left is that Omar returns -- not because, like Marlo, he can't stay away from what he knows and does -- but because he's on a mission of revenge (or justice, depending on how you see it). This framing continues to make him a glorified character who is even described as a superhero. Giving him an unexpected and ignoble end, shot unawares by a child, might have been an effort to undercut the glorification, but it didn't work for me at all. The writers placed so much emphasis on Omar's "code" throughout the seasons that he might have suffered his end even had he known it was coming, because he would have avoided shooting a child if at all possible. So Omar lived and died by his code to the end. 

What's more, although few characters got memorialized on the show, I think Omar got his own brand of memorial -- a living one. In S4 there was a scene in the gym that seemed to be framing Michael and Duquan as the future Avon and Stringer. And they could have been. Avon tells Stringer, right before the revelation about Dee's murder, that Stringer was never enough of a soldier. Yet like Stringer, Duquan's future lay in the business side of things (I thought it a nice touch that they indicated this to be technology). But in the end, Duquan ends up just being a victim and Michael takes on a different role model. He's going to be Omar, not Avon, which made me wonder if the reason Omar was on the outskirts blasting in wasn't just because of his sexuality, but because, like Michael, he was originally just trying to save himself. 

Going back to the problematic tropes issue, one thing that Omar violates in the storyline is that he is one of the "heroes that always have to be the masters of their own fates, to be active and not take anything that life deals at them lying down (whereas most of the time, we lie down, we accept, we deal with what we have been given)." A lot of characters spend a lot of time lying down in The Wire. Even McNulty, whose very core is to fight, often in very inappropriate ways, has to do it from time to time. But not Omar.

He also violates the second point cited, in "how teams exist only either as a background and foil for a single hero, or as a compendium of individuals, each fighting to be outdo each other in stupid displays of heroism." This is true only with Omar on the series, even though we have multiple examples of teams in the series. His teams are the ones loaded with people who serve his story rather than their own. And the way they do calls up yet another unpleasant trope.

Omar's original purpose in the storyline is to give the police information because his lover has been fridged in a brutal way. His second lover ends up being the bait for him to work with Brother Mouzone (even though Omar would very likely have done so anyway for his own reasons). Only his third lover ends up getting away (and presumably quite wealthy). What's more, Tosha's death, though she is not _his_ lover, is nonetheless used as a lever to cause Omar to strike out on his own and as a cause of angst on his part. I suspect the writers thought they were subverting this trope because Omar is a gay black man, rather than a straight white one, and the death of his lover is not simultaneously symbolic of the destruction of a man's domestic sphere. But given the way this trope ties into several others that Omar does _not_ subvert, I think that his personal characteristics don't make him different enough.

#### The Medium in the Message

The true thrust of the series is criticism of the media, well before they took it on explicitly in S5. In fact, S5 was the most sensationalistic, not just because of a storyline that dealt with sensationalism but because it focused so explicitly on someone who was clearly _not_ doing his job, as opposed to targeting what happened when media entities actually did their work according to their own standard of ethics. But pretty much every decision made on The Wire was done to stand apart from the normal approach by U.S. media to its presentation of practically anything in our everyday lives. 

These decisions began with a focus on the medium of television, of course, but I think it also showed how very rarely any of the sort of dialogue and concerns of people outside the halls of political power and major finance ever appeared in any written portrayals of American life. The consistent depiction of poverty and the working class alone made the show unusual. Given that most dramas tend to be about doctors, lawyers, and other professions in the educated upper middle class (even many comedies), you'd think that the plethora of crime shows across networks would actually give some screen time to other parts of life. But they will, almost without exception, look like a complete joke compared to the world of The Wire -- while at the same time the jokes on The Wire (memorably, for me, the photocopier lie detector) would seem like fantasy if they weren't duplicating real life.

One of the final things that I am glad The Wire did was not only that it provided a chance for the majority of Americans to actually see the reality of their lives onscreen, but that it gave so many talented actors the chance to make that reality vivid and meaningful. It seems sad to think that hardly any will get the chance at such wonderful roles again in their careers. But as someone told Wendell Pierce once, he could sell out as much as he wanted to in the future because he would always have been Bunk on The Wire.

The role of the media and the way it was addressed in the series also proved to be a sacred cow that needed culling. The Wire remains fairly unrewarded within its own industry. I find that extremely telling since it certainly wasn't from any lack of artistic merit. However, the constant harping on this point by everyone doing commentaries began to grate on me. For starters, as much as the series deserved recognition, I think it was more important that it got a Peabody than an Emmy. One could go on for hours about the lack of "justice" in Emmy choices stretching back decades. The Peabody, on the other hand, seems to nail shows that have deep significance as well as quality in a variety of ways. The show also got various critics awards. 

While I think there is complete justification for assuming that racism had a lot to do with the general lack of attention to the series (considering its merits), I find it quite interesting that it never won an NAACP award despite being nominated as many as four times every season. (It's even more eyebrow raising when you look at who did win "Best Drama" during those years). I am left thinking of the confrontation in the penultimate episode between McNulty and the reporter, Templeton. McNulty knows what he's getting out of the serial killer story, but can't picture what Templeton is -- then acknowledges that he's not part of Templeton's "tribe." Templeton, of course, is fishing for a Pulitzer in the short term, and a career stint at a prestigious publication long-term. I suspect that the obsession with Emmys has a lot to do with what "tribe" the collective behind The Wire is part of, and the fact that the _media_ favors certain awards. 

For example, an Oscar winner hardly ever has their name used without those two words preceding them. Nobel and Pulitzer winners have a similar status. The Emmy is a less prestigious award but it is still regularly mentioned. However unless one is doing a career biography piece or an obituary, it is unlikely that any award outside of the major one in someone's profession gets mentioned (i.e., a Grammy for a musician). And aside from carping about the lack of Emmys, David Simon mentioned more than once in a commentary how he can't believe that a television series doesn't get people talking about real issues any more than his newspaper articles did. 

Which is why their S5 storyline was a cheat. I got the distinct impression that the show was trying to curry favor with the media and that they softballed the media's problems as a result. The media currying could have been done with the noblest of intentions, which is that they wanted the media to find a springboard for discussing the many social and political issues raised in The Wire as part of a national dialogue. In fact, this was practically stated outright as a motivation for the series. However, I suspect that they also felt that they should have been deserving of awards because they were doing something serious and necessary, compared to everything else that's on TV. I can't disagree with them but I began to suspect that maybe their attitude about the whole thing didn't help their cause. And I also found it surprisingly naive of them to think that a TV series would be any more likely to incite national dialogue about topics that the media avoids for very self-serving reasons. Perhaps if they had done a more biting portrayal of the media they would have gotten their wish, because if there's one thing the media can't seem to resist discussing, it's itself. 

I wanted to throw something at my radio this week when I heard NPR doing a piece on the media coverage of the Wall Street protests, and all but whining about how there isn't more coverage because it's so difficult to figure out what the point of the protests is. If they are so incompetent that they can't figure out how to interview people to reach a conclusion which seems quite obvious to casual observers, then the last thing they need to do is either point it out or blame the movement itself for their inability to do proper reporting. Because I am deeply cynical, my own conclusion is that they're perfectly aware of why the protests exist, but would prefer to blame the movement for lack of "focus" and "clarity" than bring the topics at hand onto their agenda for discussion -- because that would be biting the hands that feed them. That's why we've moved on from a strategy of dismissiveness to one of blame. The media's primary purpose is to perpetuate itself, not to bring anything of value to the country at large, and they don't survive by siding against monied interests.

Returning to The Wire, I thought it was interesting that there was a lack of insight into the web as a competitor for people's time and interest. There was a big focus on the issue of "free" and giving away the newspaper's product in the commentaries. I am not about to argue that this was, indeed, a poor move by news organizations long-term. However, I think that what remains unexamined in this view is that other organizations wouldn't step into the vacuum to provide that information. A number of "breaking news" stories have occurred outside of large media platforms in the past decade because the established media either wouldn't touch it, or were distracted by other things. The internet has broadened the number of voices that can have a say on either specific issues, or in talking about other issues that don't get discussed. I think the real problem for newspapers and magazines is that they have to compete with _television_ not the web, and that's been going on for a long time. And as TV ratings began to decline and news there suffered from similar cutbacks to what's gone on in print, the push to be more frantic and more sensational has just become worse across the board. 

So I saw S5's focus on the internal management as the primary problem with news organizations to only be part of the story, and very navel gazing. Instead I thought they should have better connected newspapers to other media, as well as to popular entertainment. In fact, The Wire's very lack of broad public success can be seen as a direct correlation to how newspapers have lost ground to tabloids and TV, and how any serious drama is generally trumped by "reality" programming and sweeps-week bait in the entertainment field. People are indeed under-informed about many things, but providing information alone is never enough. Perhaps they should have better remembered Bunny Colvin's lesson in S4. If you want to get the street level dealers into Hamsterdam, then you need to target the lieutenants -- you'll never be able to reach the bosses causing the problems. And they won't go along with it because they trust you, but because they'd be making too much money not to.

The Wire's perspective on journalism was more dictated by issues from the early 90s than in the last decade. The topic of technology is an interesting one when you consider the first 6 episodes versus the last 6, and the complexity of what McNulty and Freamon did. But I think how technology is rapidly adapted by criminals on the street is a thread in the series that's not that prominent, but is still there. I think that The Wire has a blind spot to the function of the media because the creators clearly expect much more from it than it has ever provided or ever will.


End file.
